Posted
by
samzenpuson Monday May 17, 2010 @12:32PM
from the seven-words-you-can-always-say-in-public dept.

The ACLU is suing the police in Pennsylvania for issuing tickets to people who swear. They argue that it is every American's constitutional right to drop an F-bomb. From the article: "'Unfortunately, many police departments in the commonwealth do not seem to be getting the message that swearing is not a crime,' said Marieke Tuthill of the ACLU of Pennsylvania. 'The courts have repeatedly found that profanity, unlike obscenity, is protected speech.'" This is a big f*cking deal.

And as to the ACLU fighting to say profanity is everyone's right, well, it's everyone's right to be a fool too, but that doesn't mean it's the best thing to be.... Is the ACLU going to go to court and support the Constitutional right be a fool too? It makes about as much sense.

I find it amazing that people will say a Christian doesn't have the right to spread/proselytize their religion, or the symbols of Christianity offend them, and want all symbols of Christianity wiped out, while they will fight for the right to offend someone else with their profanity. It's nothing but pure hypocrisy.

You conveniently forget that the government shall also make no law prohibiting the free expression of religion. The Constitution has balance, it's extremely well-thought-out. Your post is all one-sided, and so is the way the Constitution has been interpreted in the last few decades. The Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

During the early years of Federal government, under our current Constitution and while the creators of it were still alive, States actually sponsored different denominations. That's right. There was State sponsored religion, but not Federal sponsored religion. Thomas Jefferson even started a church that met in the Capitol building that had 2,000 people attending it on a weekly basis. The founding fathers saw nothing wrong with expressing their religious beliefs wherever, and whenever, they so desired. They just recognized that it was wrong to oppress someone who disagreed with them on religious issues. At the same time they weren't going to allow anyone else to oppress them because of their beliefs.

The "wall of separation" letter was written to a church who feared they would be oppressed by the government because they were small. His letter was in response to that. The context makes all the difference. He wasn't saying there couldn't be any religious display on public premises. He was reaffirming the idea that the government could not restrict that group's right to worship as they pleased.

"Is the ACLU going to go to court and support the Constitutional right be a fool too?"

They frequently do go to court to defend peoples' right to do foolish things. I suppose that if a law were passed making it unlawful to be a fool, then they would fight it directly, but in the absence of such laws they've defended individual foolish things instead. For example, it would be very foolish for a chapter of the American Nazi Party to march through the streets of a town with more Holocaust survivors per capita than any other in America... and yet they have sued (and won, although the group evidently thought better of it and called the event off) to affirm precisely that right.

"I find it amazing that people will say a Christian doesn't have the right to spread/proselytize their religion, or the symbols of Christianity offend them, and want all symbols of Christianity wiped out"

What people? If you're claiming that the ACLU has supported any such view or action, then you are sorely mistaken. Even a cursory glance at their catalog of suits will turn up cases where they argued explicitly FOR allowing private citizens to express their Christian beliefs in the face of censorship. That said, Christians have a bit of a persecution complex, imagining that they are oppressed when it is clearly not so; they also like to mistake failure to give them overtly preferential treatment at all times with attempting to destroy their faith, which is less endearing than they think.

"while they will fight for the right to offend someone else with their profanity"

I often find that it is substantially easier to offend a person if you don't use any profanity at all. In fact, a not insignificant people aren't offended by profanity in the slightest. You have no right not to be offended.

Fortunately the ACLU defends your right to distribute religious material.

February 21, 2003: The American Civil Liberties Union came to the defense of students in a Massachusetts high school who were suspended for distributing candy canes with Christian messages on them. The ACLU argued that their suspension violated the students’ freedom of speech.

July 11, 2002: ACLU defends the right of Iowa public school students to distribute Christian literature during non-instructional hours of school.

So... thank God for the ACLU standing up for our right to practice religious freedom and expression and keeping Government forced religion out of our lives.

...and thank them for standing up for our fucking right to free expression.

Ummmm.... Mindless zombies always damage society. It doesn't matter whether or not they are religious or not. Your argument seems based on the idea that mindless zombies exist only because of religion. This is patently false.

I see the same argument you make all the time, but I see very little logic in it. Mostly it is just an ad hominen fallacy. The problem isn't religion, it's how unscrupulous people pervert/twist it for their own purposes.

I was raised in an extremely disfunctional home. My old man would read a religious author and go off on a tangent. He threw me out of house and whipped pretty severely at age 7 for me for saying that if using dice to play a game is gambling so is using a spinner. He fixated on one idea to the exclusion of same author saying that parents should never attempt to break their children's wills or stifle thought and choice in their children. The author said it was a sin to do that. Now why did he choose the one idea that he perverted into abusing me and completely ignored the ideas that would have kept him from abusing me? Because of religion? That's an insanely stupid suggestion. He did so because of his own warped character. He found what he wanted and stopped there. That's not the fault of any religion. In my opinion it was mental illness. If he hadn't found some type of justification for his actions in one place, he would have found it in another. He chose to be cruel despite everything in his religion that forbade cruelty.

Now, back to society at large.... Take, for instance, the 10 Commandments. All societies would be much more stable if those 10 principles were followed. Crime would cease to exist. Most of societies ills would disappear. Yet, those 10 principles are attacked as being outdated foolishness. Why? Human nature is no different today than it was when those principles were given, and during the times those principles were followed by the Hebrews/Isrealites their society was prosperous, free, and had very little crime.

Other Hebrew religious laws made sure the poor were fed, that servants were given their freedom and debtors were released from their debt every year of Jubilee, that non-Hebrews/Isrealites were treated fairly and humanely, that the Gentiles had the same rights as the Isrealites had. Forgiveness of debt happened once every 49 years. So, say your family hit hard times and had to sell its land. Your family got its land back at the year of Jubilee. So, was that just? Yup. Was it merciful? Yup. Did it keep the wealthy from robbing the poor, and their descendants, of their inheritance? Yup. It was a just system. It was a religious system.

I see you haven't read the news over the last few years. Students can't pray in school. A nativity scene can't be displayed in a park during Christmas. The lawsuit over, and the theft of, the cross honoring WWI GI's who died in combat.

Those come off the top of my head, but I can find many, many more. These types of instances happen on a regular basis.

I have no problem with that at all. My right to punch you, figuratively speaking, stops where your nose begins.

You have every right to disagree with me, just as I have every right to disagree with you. I think you fail to understand though that your rights were first spelled out in the source from whence came my Bible, the Talmud, the Old Testament. That's where they were first expressed.

Hate my religion if you will, but recognize that it was the Protestant idea of the individual's ownership of his life

While I agree that they both are censorship, I disagree that they are both equally problematic.

I could, right now, write a reply that consists only of the f-word, I chose not to, and this is fine, and even admirable. This was my decision, no one forced it on me.

If I decided to write said alternative reply, and Slashdot, or the Government stepped in and stopped me, this would be a different problem, since a third party was infringing on my ability to act as I wish.

Besides that, I never understood the argument about "limited vocabulary" anyway. For instance, I'm sure the word "computer" appears a lot. Now, there are lots of synonyms for "computer" than can be used, and there are lots of flowery phrases that are possible. But we don't complain that someone has a "limited vocabulary" because he says "computer" instead of replacing the word with some kind of phrase that's more creative. Why should this be a legitimate complaint about swear words? Sure, they're not creative. Neither is calling your computer a computer or using the word "the" (one of the most unoriginal words in common use). Unless you're judging a creative writing competition, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

"the" comes from the Germanic pronouns der, die, das, des, and so on. It used to have a purpose, to indicate gender of the noun, but now it's just a filler word because saying, "Girl ran after ball and up hill," sounds wrong to our ears.

Let me help, when you use a swear word as an adjective, you miss the opportunity to use an adjective that would help the listener. Think of someone leaving a class room where the just got a bad grade on their test they could say, "I hate that f*cking teacher. He is such an *ss" removing the swear word, "I hate that teacher. He is an..." makes it clear that the thought is really quite banal, makes you sound stupid (worthy of the C). The speaker would feel compelled to add something so that they might say, "I hate that droning teacher. He is never nice to me." Much more communicative.

Let me help, when you use a swear word as an adjective, you miss the opportunity to use an adjective that would help the listener.

Maybe, maybe not. There is a Soviet urban legend about this...

Russian profanities [wikipedia.org] are considerably more expressive than English ones, mainly due to the ability of the language to combine word roots in more creative ways, and rich inflections. Consequently, it is common for people, especially males, and stereotypically lower classes, to substitute virtually all grammatical categories with swearwords, while still retaining the structure of the sentence to the point that its original meaning is understandable.

Now, the legend... the way it goes, the above was very much true in a certain Soviet factory, where workers identified both parts and processes using a rich swearword lexicon. So "this little fuckthing" (which would be a single word in Russian) meant a very specific part, and "fuck it over through the cunt" (again, a single word) meant applying a very specific technological process to that part; and so on.

Which all went well, in fact, until there was a scheduled inspection of the factory by local Party leadership, and the supervisors forbade workers from swearing. That day, the factory stalled, because the workers on the ground could not coherently explain the manufacturing process, much less coordinate it, without resorting to their original lexicon. They simply haven't used the "proper" names of the parts in years or decades - depending on how long people have been working there!

There's also another army-related joke on the subject. As it goes, Soviet officers were taught that, in theory, Soviet army had a disadvantage in battle because Russian words are, on average, twice as long as English words, and therefore orders take twice as much time to give and to understand. However, in practice, this was found to not be a problem, since in combat conditions, Soviet officers would switch almost entirely to swearwords for all their orders, which are significantly shorter, mostly matching English for all practical purposes.

Take it for what you will, though, according to my (ex-Soviet army major, combat service in Afghanistan) father, the army joke is spot on.

"Fuck" is the most versatile word in the English language. It can be used in every part of speech (except as a preposition, though it can be part of a prepositional phrase). The sentence, "Fuck those fucking fuckers," for example, packs a lot of meaning in what is really only two words. There are so many uses for that one word that someone wrote an entire book [google.com] on it. In it, it calls "fuck" the "most important and powerful word in the English language."

I was with you up until: "at least on principle, I find that their legal support of such people as some sort of "enlightened" viewpoint is almost just as shallow."

What?

"at least on principle" - Well of course...that's the whole reason behind the suit, the principle of the matter.

"I find that their legal support of such people as some sort of "enlightened" viewpoint is almost just as shallow."- What? If you believe in a principle, you defend the right of ALL people. Just like John Adams defending the British

I've found that the amount of swearing and choice of curse words is strongly linked to socioeconomic background. I know plenty of people from typical working class backgrounds who despite having college educations, high IQs, large vocabularies and all the necessary tools for swear-free communication will still curse a lot more than other friends who come from the middle or upper classes of society, they also tend to use simpler swear words with more direct "force" behind them.

Someone from the upper class is more likely to avoid swearing in general and will most likely often try to vary him-/herself when swearing while someone with a working class background is more likely to just blurt out "fuck", "fuck you", "fuck it", "ah fuck", "fuck this shit" and so on.

Also, since language in general is very context-dependent it is likely that using "fuck", "shit", "cunt" or another swear word in a sentence will not distort the message enough for it to be unintelligible.

Of course, this whole fucking post is based on a big pile of anecdotal shit.

I don't really mind swearing, and occasionally let loose. However, I do find it... perhaps childish?...when people find something funny simply because a fuck was added into the mix. Look at this thread: Dozens of comments that are basically contentless, modded +5 funny because they have 'fucking' in them. I don't find it offensive, just juvenile and lame, like kids giggling after they say 'poop'.

I might have this backwards because copyright, etc. seems to be a morass - but I don't think the record companies can sue for you performing a song yourself. I think that is ASCAP that does that - the people representing the songwriters and composers. You know, the ones who don't want restaurant staff to be able to sing Happy Birthday. Generally isn't it ASCAP that hassles locations that hire cover bands and not the RIAA?

My point was that if a government entity uses its monopoly powers to require all users of a service to sign a contract, then that contract is a de facto law. I'll put it another way. The law says that the only way you can broadcast on that spectrum is by signing the contract with the FCC. If you break the contract, you are fined an arbitrary amount determined by the FCC. That pretty much makes the contract de facto law. Saying that the FCC's rules aren't the law is just playing a semantics game.

I was under the understanding that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had already shot down the "disorderly conduct" law that was used to disenfranchise people's rights. It would be nice if the ACLU could come to New York and do the same for our law.

I go to NY, every few years for my sister and the last time I was there I distinctly remember a cop giving directions to some Midwesterner tourist swearing every other word while the tourist sat there wide-eyed with kids.

" Yeah, you take the fucking right and go right past fucking Portland street. "

As long as you include a disclaimer you should be fine in either case...

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Please consult with your physician or health practitioner prior to beginning any exercise/diet program.

An American rights group is suing the police in Pennsylvania for issuing tickets, which carry a jail sentence, to people for swearing.

...

One lawsuit involves an unidentified woman in Luzerne County in northeast Pennsylvania who was given a citation which carries a maximum penalty of $300 and 90 days in jail after she yelled an offensive word at a motorcyclist who swerved close to her in October 2008.

The police are doing their job when they write you a ticket for speeding. You were speeding you got a ticket.

The police were not doing their job when they wrote me a ticket for turning left at a no-left-turn intersection. I did not turn left. True story.

You said a foul word their is a law on the books that says you can be punished for it.

Unconstitutional.

You were jay walking their is a law on the books that prevents that. You were smoking weed in your house their is a law against it.

The police’s job is to protect me from others, and if necessary, to protect them from me. It is not their job to protect me from myself.

These laws that were made by the people for the people is being enforced by a group of people who were given the power to enforce the laws made by the people with a law that was made for the people by the people.

I know you’re trying to be clever but when you can’t keep the tenses straight between your nouns and verbs anymore you might be trying too hard. Not to mention I had to read it three times to figure out what it said (which was of course just what you had intended).

The person you want to speak with in regards to the fucking issue here is your towns council / State legislators and not the fucking police. You don't like the laws then have them changed.

Now that I don’t disagree with... but will it get me back the $300 for the no-left-turn ticket and the legal expense of getting it converted to a non-moving violation?

I want to live in a country that when the police violate laws they can be sued and put in jail for it.

In the USA, being a cop means you have a license to do what you want. You can even kill someone, firing several shots in his back and get away with it. It happens every month in the USA.

You can be detained for no reason and you have no recourse. you can be severly assaulted by the police for no reason other than a peaceful protest and have no recourse. People have been tazed enough times to caus them to get more tazers because they emptied them, because they would not unchain themselves from a fence. That officer needs to not only lose everything he owns, but be blackballed from ever being a cop again. I prefer he be thrown in prison with a COP banner on him.

Operation Personal Rant = engaged / Ah the classic, if you don't agree with policy, move away statement. Listen here fucktard, I am a Iraq Combat vet, and consider myself a patriot. While this gives me no more right to speech than any other American citizen, it gives me clout with fuckheads like you. What I do not consider myself a BLIND patriot. As Howard Zinn stated, "DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM" Very few people (only pure anarchists) would want to live "in a country without police", What I don't want is for police that are militaristic, don't know the law, often have no better education than highschool, and are increasingly corrupt in my country. The entire "Love it or leave it" is predicated on the premise that either you COMPLETELY love (read: agree) with all policy of the USA (Which any semi-intelligent person does not) or you do not deserve and should not live here. Thats not how it works. I can love my country, and hate it's government, (or the power elite who have gotten us into this mess we are in today). What it boils down to, is that this type of statement is one of the most destructive to discourse tactics used by people who have little knowledge or facts to defend their beliefs, where the then label someone with a negative, anti-american label so as to discredit them. This is known as a argumentative logical fallacy as a "ad hominem" attack. Where you attack the person presenting an argument instead of the argument. YOU DO NOT HAVE A RIGHT TO NOT BE OFFENDED!

As a transitive verb for instance.. John fucked Shirley.
As an intransitive verb... Shirley fucks.

Its meaning is not always sexual, it can be used as...

An adjective such as... John's doing all the fucking work.
As part of an adverb... Shirley talks too fucking much.
As an adverb enhancing an adjective... Shirley is fucking beautiful.
As a noun... I don't give a fuck.
As part of a word... absofuckinglutely -or- infuckingcredible.
And as almost every word in a sentence... Fuck the fucking fuckers.

As you must realize, there aren't too many words with the versatility of fuck...such as these examples describing situations such as:

Fraud: I got fucked at the used car lot.
Dismay: ahhh fuck it.
Trouble: I guess I'm really fucked now.
Aggression: Don't fuck with me buddy.
Difficulty: I don't understand this fucking question.
Inquiry: Who the fuck was that?
Dissatisfaction: I don't like what the fuck is going on here.
Incompetence: He's a fuck-off.
Dismissal: Why don't you go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself...

I'm sure you can think of many more examples.

With all these multi-purpose applications, how can anyone be offended when you use the word. We say use this unique, flexible word more often in your daily speech.

I had a friend flip off a cop once for cutting him off on a road in Erie. The cop turned around, put his lights on, and gave him a ticket for obscenity.

He challenged the ticket mentioning freedom of speech as well as the fact that the officer didn't even show up. In the end he won, but that doesn't excuse the fact that police officers in Pennsylvania can waste people's time like this on power trips.

When your power is conditionally granted to you by the people, for their security and greater good, abusing it is a very serious matter.

If cops want to be assholes in their capacity as private citizens, that is not my problem. If they cross the line into employing state resources or power to do so, then they are lower than dirt in my eyes. Best case, they should find another line of work. Worst case, we can always run a little "How long will the crooked cop last in prison?" experiment...

Michigan did a sneaky trick in this regard. They imposed a "Driver Responsibility Fee" and attached it to a fairly broad selection of traffic violations, from things as severe as driving while severely intoxicated, to stuff as innocuous as not having proof of insurance - misplacing papers, effectively.

I got hit with it a few years ago for no POI, $200 a year for two years. The court can't waive it because it's "not a court fine" - it comes directly from the State Treasury Dept.

Punishing someone who didn’t hurt anyone, is hurting someone, and hence a crime.Swearing can not be considered hurting anyone.Simple as that.

Now physically it is completely possible for swearing to cause physical damage to someone. If his brain is set-up is a way that that input pattern triggers neurons that create the damage. (Either in the brain trough severe mis-association [or what the average Joe would call self-damaging irrational behavior], or in the rest of the body trough e.g. epilepsy, paralysis, etc.) But of course that can only happen if something previously set the brain up that way. (Usually a long process over multiple generations with at least one war and one abuse being involved.;)

Some people who are unable to live in normal society anymore, or have some weird associations in their brain. But you can’t be expected to be cautious of everything that could damage them. Or you could never go outside anymore, since all people are different.Imagine you walk down the street, and someone who got raped by someone in jeans sees you wearing them. This causes him to burst into tears, and he sues you for it. That’s the WTF that is the logical extension of making it illegal to swear.

I think the root of the problem is that the average Joe still thinks that there is such a thing as “the guilty one”. In science the concept of guilt is already thrown overboard. Because for everything that happened, you can say that it was caused by someone else, and that someone else is therefore the actual guilty one. And so on, until the beginning of the universe.

Things are just what they are. There is no good and evil. Asian philosophers knew this for a loong time.So logically there is only one “punishment” that is morally acceptable: Separation. In case of a community with common rules vs. one person with other rules: banishment. Or in case of two sets of people with vastly different views in one country: Splitting up the country.This is a good thing, as it allows everyone to happily live by his own rules. Because nobody should impose his rules on someone else.This is even true for murderers & co: Put them on an island, and let them see how they survive with nobody wanting contact with them. If the manage to survive, and manage to do enough good to be accepted peers again, then they are officially forgiven. And after some generations, there will again be a normal society of good people on that island.If not, and they die, or fail otherwise, then this is also a good thing.I consider such a system 100% fair and the best thing for everyone.

Apparently some people think certain words are evil, bad and offensive regardless of the context in which they are used. This argument is of course fucking absurd. Word have no meaning without context. I believe George Carlin addressed this issue at some length and expense [wikipedia.org].

I think the question is not that certain words are evil, but that profanity can be valuable. This value is lost from overuse.

One of my HS English teachers (roughly) described it this way:

If you call everyone a motherfucker, then everyone is a motherfucker and it doesn't have value.But if you rarely or never use the word and walk into the principal's office and say "LISTEN HERE, MOTHERFUCKER!" then you're making a point."

While words have power, there's some non-small number of folks who believe that words have intrinsic power. As in, for some reason, a particular combination of sounds has some inherent ability to produce effects.

I attribute this to magical thinking, frankly. Believing that profanity is inherently bad is akin to believing that if I say the right faux-latin words and wave a stick at you, I can produce some effect. (Hell, the alternative word "cursing" plays right into that hypothesis)

Can somebody even define what separates swear words from acceptable words? In learning a couple foreign languages, I had to be often corrected when a word I picked up turned out to be on a community's do-not-utter list.

Certain words have crept into vocabulary and are now used to the exclusion of other words. It seems young folks are unable, now, to express themselves without swear words. It seems that they are completely unaware that there are actual words that actually MEAN what they are trying to say; but since they don't know them, they attach the same word that everyone else attaches for emphasis. So we end up with sentences that include the same word, for emphasis, three times... when all they really mean to say is "

If Penn wants people to be 'polite' and not use profanity in public places, thats perfectly acceptable, IF they vote it into law. If its not a law then thats it, game over... majority rules, if a community doesn't want people swearing in public then you deal with it.

Okay, time for a quick high-school civics refresher. The basis of law in the United States all derives from the U.S. constitution. While the 10th amendment to that constitution does grant the states and the people a lot of latitude, it explicitly places the protections of the rest of the constitution as superior to any laws that might be passed by the states (or any lower level). That's why the Supreme Court can and frequently does strike down statutes and ordinances that they find to be in conflict with the Constitution.

In other words, if Pennsylvania wants to pass "community standards" laws that constrain speech in this way, they really only have two choices: (1) somehow get an amendment to US Constitution that curtails the 1st amendment; or (2) secede. From a practical perspective, #1 won't happen, and #2 would probably be met with armed resistance.